The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  He didn’t go home though. Instead, he showed up at the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library wielding a semiautomatic shotgun. He took three hostages, Emma’s co-workers. Basically, he’d lost his mind—he wanted them to tell him where Emma had gone. He wouldn’t believe they didn’t know. The police had to be called in. There was a standoff that lasted six and a half hours. Despite all this, Emma’s co-workers refused to press charges and even testified on his behalf when he appeared in court. Apollo spent two months on Rikers Island. And now, as the hint of dawn appeared in the sky, Apollo Kagwa was free again. He hadn’t told Lillian he’d be arriving, hadn’t spoken to Patrice since he’d gone to jail. No one else left. Remarkable to think his inner circle consisted of only four human beings.

  The men departed the bus like soldiers on leave. Maybe Rikers released the men in such a remote location, at a time so early, because they wanted to risk as little collateral damage as possible. Like the thinking behind doing atomic testing in the desert or on some distant isle. Though there were always casualties in those cases, weren’t there? The land of the Bikini Atoll remained uninhabitable to this day. Apollo felt as if he glowed with grief, poisoned with mourning instead of radiation. He couldn’t go home. He could not be in that place. Not yet. This was why he might’ve been the only man on the bus who didn’t want to board it. Everyone else wanted to get back home, but Apollo Kagwa had no home anymore.

  APOLLO ARRIVED AT Bennett Park and didn’t even realize how he got there. It had been five-thirty in the morning by the time he reached Washington Heights. His body had become used to hitting the park with Brian at that hour, so even after months away, that’s where his body took him. He had an appointment downtown at eleven, but that was a long time from now.

  He entered the park and saw the tops of four men’s heads, gathered in a semicircle by the play structures, and he came out of his hazy state and nearly turned away. He’d been meaning to go to the apartment, hadn’t he? But then they saw him, just a quick glance from two of the New Dads, and Apollo didn’t know what to do. How much weirder would it look if he ran away? So instead he moved toward them. They were his friends—of course he should say hello.

  He quickened his pace and almost fell as he reached the playground gate. When he entered the gated area, the four men turned and watched him. To a man, all of them scanned him and abruptly looked away with embarrassment. Apollo saw this but tried to unsee it. The mothers were nearby, at the swings with their kids, exactly as they had been three months ago. Except today his hands were empty. He carried nothing. He had no child. He moved toward the other fathers, and probably for the first time ever, he shook each man’s hand. Then he turned to the play equipment.

  “Hi, Meaghan,” he said. “Hi, Imogen. Good morning, Shoji. Good morning, Isaac.”

  Apollo grinned at the other dads as the four kids ignored him.

  “Imogen is walking so well,” Apollo said.

  Normally her father would’ve taken the opportunity to explain exactly when she’d made the progress. More than likely he had a video—ten videos—of the early tries. He should’ve already had his phone out for the other dads to see, but this morning he didn’t do any of that. He registered Apollo’s words with a nod, but then merely blinked at his daughter, looked dazed.

  All four of the men looked stunned, in fact. Disoriented. They stole the quickest of glances at Apollo, then immediately looked away, at the children or the trees or Fort Washington Avenue, anywhere but back at him.

  Apollo understood this was happening, but he felt addled, too. He didn’t know why he’d come, and now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do with his hands, didn’t know what to say. Should he keep commenting on the kids and their progress, or should he explain where he’d been? Did they want to know about the bullpens on Rikers Island? About his morning shifts on the grounds crew? Of course not, of course not, but what should he talk about instead? He should leave. They talked about only one thing here on the playground, and he didn’t want to talk about that, he couldn’t, but before he turned to go, it came up anyway.

  “Apollo,” Isaac’s father said quietly. “We all felt terrible when we saw the news.”

  The other three fathers nodded but still refused to look at Apollo.

  “We wanted to get in touch somehow, but none of us ever traded numbers with you.”

  Apollo almost melted with relief. He took out his phone, but it had no charge. Rikers Island wasn’t in the habit of sending prisoners home with a full battery. It was just an automatic gesture. “I’d like that,” he said.

  None of the New Dads spoke. Instead, Isaac’s father put a hand on Apollo’s shoulder and patted it gently. Then he moved so he stood beside Apollo. Shoji’s father then moved alongside Isaac’s, and in an instant the semicircle of fathers formed a barrier that blocked any view of their children.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Imogen’s father said. The man opened and closed his hands, the fingers turning tense as claws.

  “You’re mad at me?” Apollo said. His heart beat more rapidly than it had even on his first night at Rikers. “You’re mad at me?” he said again.

  “No one’s angry,” Isaac’s father whispered.

  “I’m angry,” Imogen’s father said. “I’m angry you came around our kids.”

  Apollo tried to speak but only stammered. He had the impulse to smash his phone into the side of this man’s face. “I would never hurt your children,” he whispered.

  Shoji’s father looked over his shoulder, catching some movement with his practiced parent’s eye. “Did you snatch that from Meaghan?” he asked. “Give it back. Give it back.”

  Meaghan snatched back whatever “that” had been, and Shoji grabbed at it, too. The pair of them screeched as they scrapped. The fathers of both kids turned and rushed in, a tactical support team.

  This left only two of the fathers with Apollo. They watched him nervously.

  “You’re scared of me,” Apollo said.

  “You went into that library with a gun!” Imogen’s father shouted. It sounded that much louder because of the earliness of the morning.

  “I was trying to—” Apollo began, but stopped himself.

  “We’re really sorry about Brian,” Isaac’s father said. “I can’t tell you how sorry.”

  Hearing his son’s name uttered out loud made Apollo’s stomach quake. He hadn’t spoken the name since being handcuffed by the police sixty days ago, but in his mind, his heart, he’d been repeating it a thousand times an hour. It sounded strange in the other man’s mouth. Apollo had the urge to tear out his tongue.

  “We’re just trying to be good dads here,” Isaac’s father said.

  “I was, too,” Apollo said.

  He turned to leave Bennett Park. Six in the morning, and no choice left but to go back home.

  “YOU GOT TO wake up. You can’t sleep here.”

  Had Apollo fallen asleep? Surprising. He’d only meant to sit here in the basement of his building, in the laundry room, for a little while. He’d figured he could wait the time out until his appointment down here. He’d entered the elevator and planned to go up, but instead of pressing the button for the fourth floor, he went down.

  And promptly dozed off, it seemed.

  “Get up,” the man standing over him said. “You heard me? How’d you get in this building?”

  Not only had Apollo gone to sleep, he’d bedded down on the laundry room couch, nuzzled into it like a tick. He’d curled up on the cushions, his back to the man now jabbing him with a broom handle. He rolled over and sat up.

  “It’s you.”

  The super of the building, the man who’d hung the door in Apollo’s apartment, stepped back and gawped at him. He held a broom in one hand and had a length of green garden hose coiled on his left shoulder. He had the air of a sherpa, experienced and impossible to ruffle. His name was Fabian. A man in his late fifties, born in Puerto Rico, keeping this building running since long before Apollo
and Emma moved in. He lowered into a crouch and tilted his head as he watched Apollo.

  “They did a real good job on your eye,” Fabian said.

  Apollo reached up to pat the cheekbone that had been reconstructed. It would’ve been better to leave the damage visible, at least then his outside would match his inside.

  “When I found you, it was all…not good,” he said, tapping his own cheek.

  “I never got to thank you for that,” Apollo said, hand still on his face.

  “Your mother thanked me,” he said. Then he heard how it sounded, like a joke boys play with each other. “I mean, I seen her around here while you was locked up. She stopped me and gave me a hug. Bought me a tall boy, too.”

  “My mother’s been here?” Apollo asked. “My mother bought you beer?”

  Fabian rose and with his free hand helped Apollo up.

  “You got out fast,” Fabian said. “Rikers likes to hold on to people.”

  “My mother got me a lawyer,” Apollo said.

  “Good mothers are a gift,” Fabian said, tapping the bristles of the broom against the basement floor. Then he looked up, face flushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…sorry.”

  “What time is it?” Apollo asked, just to talk about something else.

  “Ten o’clock,” Fabian said. “You got your keys? You need me to let you in? I still got my set.”

  Apollo pointed to the brown paper bag on the floor by the couch. “My things are in there. I can get in.”

  But he wouldn’t have to. He had an appointment at eleven, downtown, with his parole officer. Another strange thing to be thankful for, but still it was how he felt. Was he supposed to wear a suit to his first meeting with his PO? Would it matter if he wore the clothes he’d slept in, clothes he’d been arrested in?

  Fabian nodded and turned away. He had an office down the hallway, past the washers and dryers. He made it five feet before Apollo called out to him.

  “How did you know?” Apollo asked.

  “Know what?”

  “How did you know to come into our apartment?”

  Fabian turned back but didn’t move closer. He adjusted his shoulder so the hose wouldn’t slip down his arm. “The man in number forty-seven called me,” he said. “There was a smell.” He shook his head. “It was a very bad smell. I never smelled nothing like it.”

  Apollo placed a hand against the couch for balance. “A smell,” he repeated.

  “I thought I would need my keys, but the door wasn’t locked. It was real hot inside. I shouted a few times before I came all the way in, but I had a bad feeling, too.”

  He lowered his head and scanned the floor rather than meeting Apollo’s eye.

  “I found you first. I thought you was dead. For real. Your eye was hanging out.” Fabian made a fist and dangled it by his cheek. “Then I went in the back, and I found the baby.”

  The building’s boiler, far off in another corner of the basement, rumbled. Apollo and Fabian remained quiet. Apollo wanted to ask Fabian what he’d seen in that room. No matter how horrible it might’ve been, this man had been in there with Brian. Apollo didn’t want to know a single detail, and he wanted to know all of them. Both feelings at once. But how could he ask? What would he ask? What might he say that wouldn’t seem awful and ugly and perverse? He felt the gaze of the New Dads even from here, and his body flamed with shame.

  “I said a prayer right there,” Fabian said. “When I saw him. I say a prayer for him every week at church.”

  Apollo nodded. “Thank you for that.”

  “I say them for you, too.” Fabian pointed toward his office. “I gotta go,” he said, though the words were choked.

  APOLLO REACHED EAST 79th Street slightly early. The building sat on the kind of block made for movies about Manhattan. On a broad street with a grand view running west all the way to the Hudson River. Apartment buildings only twenty or thirty stories high, small and homey by the standards of the island. It took a lot of money to make Manhattan feel quaint. And amid all this sat the Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library, an elegant townhouse and a New York City landmark.

  Apollo stood in the middle of the sidewalk staring up at the building like the worst sort of tourist. Old men gave him their elbows on purpose. Mothers used their strollers as steamrollers. He couldn’t believe he had to be here at all, but the Manhattan district court mandated his visit as a “vital aspect of his parole.”

  The event space at the Yorkville branch, in the basement, was billed as big enough to seat seventy-two. But capacity wouldn’t be tested this evening. Twelve men and women sat in chairs that had been placed in a circle. Only one of them noticed Apollo approaching, a tall woman who waved him closer. She had the casual authority of a school crossing guard, used to helping the vulnerable and confused reach safety.

  “This way,” she called. “We’ve already begun.”

  He reached the circle. The others looked at him as he sat.

  “I want to welcome you to the Survivors,” said the tall woman as she took her seat. “That’s what we call ourselves.”

  Apollo looked from one person to the next. Court-ordered group therapy. That had been a condition of his parole. Thank our progressive new mayor, the judge had told Apollo, unable to disguise his disdain.

  Apollo stayed quiet as the other Survivors spoke. It felt a lot like an AA meeting, or what he’d seen of AA meetings on television and in the movies, and more than half of these folks seemed to be struggling with some kind of drug. But instead of stories about the excessive and ugly things they’d done under the influence of this or that, these people were caught in a loop of tragedy. Something terrible happened, but for some reason I’m still here. That might as well have been the subtitle of every conversation. Soon it seemed strange to call this group the Survivors. They were here, but none of them had survived.

  “I’m still wearing my wedding ring,” Apollo said, sounding surprised. He looked up at the dozen others in the seats. Now they stared at his hand, too, and he held the ring finger up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

  Alice, the tall woman, leaned forward. “That’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  “My wife was a librarian,” Apollo said.

  Why was he talking? What was he saying?

  An older guy with a graying beard nodded. “I saw that in the news.”

  Apollo sat upright. “You knew about that? Why didn’t you say anything when I sat down?”

  The old guy crossed his arms. “I had a few problems of my own to talk about, you know.”

  Apollo actually laughed, a quick, sharp sound.

  “But now the floor is yours,” he added softly, more kindly.

  “This is my first time here,” Apollo said. “I got released from Rikers Island before the sun came up this morning. I met my parole officer this afternoon. I had to wait two hours before he saw me. And now I’m here.”

  They watched him quietly. He found each one as inscrutable as a statue of the Buddha. Alice said, “Your parole officer made you come here on the same day you were released?”

  His parole officer actually encouraged him to go home, take a shower, and get some rest. But Apollo asked for help finding a meeting right away. He’d do anything to avoid stepping back into that apartment. But how could he explain all that?

  “Yes,” Apollo said. “He’s an asshole.”

  A few of the Survivors tutted and clucked. The guy with the graying beard gave Apollo a faint nod that he interpreted as fuck the police.

  Then a younger woman spoke, haltingly. “Why did she do it? Did she explain?”

  Apollo turned to her, startled. Had they all known who he was when he appeared?

  It’s not a baby.

  “No,” Apollo said. “She didn’t explain.”

  “But why did you do it?” Alice asked this question, the pleasant air of the crossing guard having dissipated.

  “You’re talking about the library?” Apollo asked.

/>   “Yes, I am,” she said, leaning backward slightly, crossing her arms.

  “I lost my mind,” Apollo said. “I didn’t understand what Emma had done until I came out of surgery at the hospital. I was lying in my bed and watching it on the news. That’s how I found out.

  “The apartment was still considered a crime scene, so I wasn’t allowed in. I stayed at my mother’s place after I was released. When I felt strong enough, I went directly to the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library, where my wife worked. It was a Thursday. They didn’t open until noon. I got there by eleven, when I knew the other librarians would be inside preparing for the day. As you probably also heard in the news, I had a shotgun with me.”

  He had been forced to recite the events of that morning with his lawyer, a few times, and then in front of the judge and the prosecutor as well. He’d never stood before a jury, though he felt as if he was doing so now.

  “I had her work keys, and I let myself in. I found two of the three librarians on the first floor. We had to wait for the third to come from using the bathroom.”

  “Were they scared?” Alice asked.

  “Of course they were,” Apollo said.

  Now she looked down into her lap.

  “I don’t think I was making much sense,” Apollo said. “It took awhile for me to speak clearly. To tell them why I was there. That early part of the day was when I shot the ceiling by mistake. Somebody outside heard it. Which was how the police got called. Then me and the three librarians went down into the basement. I took them down there. We spent the rest of the time locked in the reading room.”

  One woman got out of her seat and left the circle. She practically sprinted from the basement.

  “When I came out of the hospital, the big story was already about the hunt for Emma Valentine. The FBI and NYPD were on the case. They’d both come to me and asked for information that might help catch her. Maybe they’d already been to the library and spoken with all three of those women. But the women obviously hadn’t told them what they knew, what I thought they knew, about Emma. Who else would she have spoken to? Those librarians were her family. Her own parents were dead, and her husband and child meant nothing to her. I couldn’t get hold of her sister. So I showed up to ask my own questions. I was sure Emma had told them something that would help me track her down.”